GALE, HUMPHREY (1671-1744), essayist, whose Intelligencer, appearing thrice weekly from 1709 to 1729, supplied the coffee-rooms of the Commonwealth with a prose manner and a code of conversation. The description of him as the first citizen of the paper commonwealth is usually meant for praise of his opinions. It more exactly describes his discovery that a writer might possess authority by behaving as a fellow reader, and that the authority would survive the confession of a mistake.
The ordinary number of the paper begins with a small disturbance: a visitor who will not leave, a bargain too carefully explained, a man whose bow is longer than his acquaintance warrants. Gale allows the offender to speak. By the time the general reflection arrives, the conduct has made its own indictment; the essayist has only to remove the flattering name under which it entered. This is the source of his ease. He seldom reasons his reader into agreement, but arranges that the reader shall recognise an absurdity a moment before its author appears to recognise it himself.
The familiar letters printed in the paper are more various than its maxims. A correspondent complains of a neighbour's vanity and, by the minuteness of the complaint, betrays his own. A householder requests a rule for governing his family, having supplied all the evidence that he cannot govern his temper. Whether any particular letter came by the post is a question of less literary consequence than collectors suppose. Gale could give another man's conviction its proper accent. His fools are not assembled merely to be dispersed by a wise sentence at the foot of the sheet; several are allowed the better of their instructor.
His period can be understood without being forgiven every prejudice it held. The coffee-room is open in his account to any man's penny; his attention is less equally distributed. The shopkeeper gets an interior life, his servant an entrance and an exit. Women most often enter as readers whose taste is to be amended, or as the occasion of men's costly follies. Yet the lively impatience he gives them sometimes exceeds the little lesson it was brought in to serve. Mehitabel Shore (q.v.) learned from precisely such escapes: her fiction lets a remark continue working after the moralist would have put it away.
Gale's influence upon the periodical essay (q.v.) was immediate and, in its weaker descendants, disastrous. A mild joke, a classical tag, and an improving close were easier to imitate than his management of another voice. The papers which merely copied his furniture made politeness a kind of anaesthetic. In the Intelligencer itself there is ordinarily something at stake, though it may be no more than the privilege of not listening to a bore.
Collected, the essays lose the interval between their appearances and invite a monotony they were never meant to endure. The reader should grant them the liberty for which they were written: a few minutes, and the possibility of returning. Gale fixed no new philosophy. He made the prose of ordinary judgment less pompous, and thereby made ordinary judgment more difficult to counterfeit. (H. M.)